Collaboration with OKI Developers at MIT
Cambridge, Aug 11-15, 2003 – Alex Chapin, Gabe Schine and Adam Franco met with developers of the Open Knowledge Iniative (OKI) at MIT for a week long residency. During that time, OKI developers introduced us to their just released open architectural specifications they designed to support the development of educational software. In turn, we demonstrated Segue, our collaborative learning system and mapped out Harmoni, our suite of application services and web application framework/architecture.
This collaboration clarified for us OKI goals and objectives and provided us the details necessary to begin implementing the OKI Service Interface Definitions for Segue version 2.0 planned for release Spring 2004.
The latest version of OSIDs (Open Service Interface Definitions) were very similiar to how the Harmoni application/services framework/architecture is built, the OSIDs perhaps being slightly more extensible. We were very impressed with the digital repository OSID. Adam has begun to implement these interfaces in PHP for Concerto (MediaDB). We will probably use the Assessment OSIDs for Measure (MOTS), our assessment module. The OSIDs for hierarchy, logging and course management will also be useful to us.
We introduced the OKI developers to our PHP classes for Database Connection which they thought may complement their work on abstracting database connectivity, a thorny problem for which we have developed an extensible solution.
We will continue to refine Harmoni over the fall. In addition we will be fleshing out Polyphony, our intermodular framework for services common to all Harmoni-enabled web applications. Polyphony is essentially another abstraction layer that Segue, Concerto, Measure and StudyDB will use to share methods for yet another level of interoperability.
Associated Colleges of the South Integrate Segue
ACS Technology Center is one of three regional Centers working with the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE). They will be releasing version 2.0 of their Course Delivery System (CDS) in which they have integrated Segue. The ACS developers did find the integration to be challenging and have provided us with important feedback that will help us improve Segue’s interoperability.